Glavin: Credit and blame on the refugee file

Minister of Citizenship and Immigration Chris Alexander speaks to the media about Canada's plan to provide faster help for Syrian and Iraqi Refugees wishing to come to Canada during a press conference in Toronto on Saturday, September 19, 2015.Aaron Vincent Elkaim / THE CANADIAN PRESS

From the soaring rhetoric of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s more ardent admirers to the racist gibberish at the Conservative party’s fringes, you would never know it. But if we must have either a culprit or a champion for Canada’s revised but still properly ambitious Syrian refugee resettlement plan, the most deserving candidate would be the recently defeated Conservative government’s citizenship and immigration minister, Chris Alexander.

After the uproar following the revelation that the family of a drowned Syrian refugee child in a photograph that outraged the world had been hoping to resettle in Canada, Alexander was pulled from the federal election campaign, re-emerging on Sept. 19 with a blockbuster announcement. Alexander unveiled a new Syrian refugee policy that built upon the Conservatives’ otherwise reasonable approach to the crisis by incorporating the best bits of both the NDP and the Liberal formulae.

A Conservative government would rapidly accelerate refugee screening and selection and resettle 20,000 government-assisted refugees before the end of 2016. There would be no limit on the number of privately-sponsored refugees brought to Canada, and an extra $100 million would be spent to support the United Nations’ Refugee Agency in its efforts in the countries bordering Syria, where the overwhelming majority of Syria’s four million refugees have fled.

That’s pretty well exactly what the Trudeau government now proposes as well, give or take the largely immaterial distinctions between government-sponsored and privately sponsored refugees. One could call the eight-week timeline extension for the first 25,000 arrivals from Jan. 1 to sometime around March 1 a “broken promise,” but it is no more worth arguing about than the overall project is worth boasting about.

To make matters even more awkward, to trace to its beginnings the bigoted hysteria that Canada’s “national project” for Syrian refugees has had to be reconfigured in order to address and dispel, that prize must go to Stephen Harper.

On Sept. 17, turning to Trudeau and New Democratic Party leader Thomas Mulcair – remember him? – Harper spoke these words: “These guys would have, in the last two weeks, us throwing open our borders and literally hundreds of thousands of people coming without any kind of security check or documentation.” This was, it should go without saying, an outright fabrication.

“Canada is back,” one hears from a great many Canadians, especially in greeting such aspects of the refugee-resettlement project as the emphasis placed on priority for Syria’s persecuted lesbians and gay men. I will confess a twinge of national pride in that, too, but it should be admitted that this is not quite as progressively innovative as it is sometimes made out. One might just as well say “Jason Kenney is back.”

As Alexander’s predecessor in the Conservative cabinet’s immigration and refugee portfolio, Kenney pioneered Canada’s refugee-resettlement lifeline to gay Iranians, Syrians and Iraqis, way back in 2009. So credit where it’s due. And to Mulcair’s credit, the NDP has drawn attention to the injustice of the effective exclusion of most “unaccompanied” young Sunni men from the refugee-selection priority schematics Trudeau’s government unveiled Tuesday.

To be even more fair, Trudeau deserves some credit for conceding that his Syrian refugee-resettlement initiative is not so much a testimony to his government’s unique generosity as it is a response to the decency so many ordinary Canadians have shown in their commitments to make some use of themselves, in ways big and small, on behalf of Syria’s bedraggled and long-betrayed refugees. “This is not about government signing a paper and bringing over refugees,” Trudeau told the CBC on Tuesday, “this is a whole of Canada effort.”

It is very much that.

“I have never felt so patriotic as a Canadian as I am today, to be involved in bringing 25,000 people from the most dire conditions on the planet here to our blessed country of Canada,” is the way the elder Liberal statesman John McCallum put it.

It is good to know that national pride is blossoming so exuberantly in McCallum’s stout Canadian heart, but one might wonder why it has taken so long. Even during the Harper years, Canada welcomed about as many refugees every year as were welcomed in the Liberal administrations of McCallum’s yesteryear heyday. But fair play to McCallum. There is much for Canadians to be proud of at the moment.

We should be proud of the congregation of Dorshei Emet, a Reconstructionist synagogue in Hampstead, Quebec, which has raised $90,000 to privately sponsor two Syrian refugee families. On other side of Canada, in Vancouver, it took only a few days for the congregation of Temple Sholom to contribute $40,000 to sponsor a Syrian refugee family following rousing sermon in September by Rabbi Dan Moskovitz.

We should be proud, too, of each of the 250 Yukoners who helped raised at least $9,000 at a dinner and silent auction last month at Porter Creek Secondary school in Whitehorse. They’re planning to sponsor a Syrian family of 10 that would otherwise be exceedingly difficult to place.

In Guelph, Jim Estill, president of the home-appliance manufacturer and retailer Danby’s, is almost singlehandedly leading an inter-faith and community-group effort to sponsor 50 Syrian families. It could have Estill shelling out the lion’s share of the $1.5 million cost of the project.

The University of Alberta has established a new president’s award that will cover the costs of tuition and living expenses for ten Syrian refugees. The University of Ottawa is taking a slightly different tack, with new scholarships for Syrian students, a legal support program to help Canadians navigate federal private-sponsorship rules, and a post-secondary certificate program to be offered to Syrian refugees in Lebanon.

On and on we could go in this heartwarming way. It makes us feel good about ourselves. It allows us to feel superior to the Americans, who have managed to roust themselves to accept only half the number of Syrian refugees – roughly 1,800 – that the Conservatives had welcomed by September. All well and good, to a point.

The very last thing Syrian refugees should be hearing from Canada or any other NATO country is anything remotely sounding like an expectation of gratitude. It has been “on our watch” that their country has been demolished, what remains of it continues to be blasted to pieces, and that is why they’re arriving among us, as refugees.

In tandem with the savageries of his accomplices in the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) Baathist dictator Bashar Assad has dropped more than 20,000 barrel bombs across the country over the past year, killing nearly 7,000 civilians. By the reckoning of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, more than 400 Syrian civilians have been murdered by Russian bombs in the two months since Vladimir Putin joined Assad’s indiscriminate war upon the Syrian people.

Inside Syria, roughly seven million people were already homeless before Putin arrived on the scene. Over the past two months, at least 100,000 people have fled Aleppo because of Russian bombs, and waves of them are pouring out of the country. Last month, the count of Syrian refugees ticked upwards to 4.3 million people.

So fine, let’s be proud and patriotic. But let’s not be too full of ourselves that we forget that Canada’s refugee-resettlement initiative, if it is a national project of any real-world meaning at all, is a project of atonement. It’s a small act of contrition, you could say. But it is penance, all the same.

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